Vanke, China’s largest residential real estate development company, is keeping up the pace. While on an inspection trip in Taipei, Wang Shi, its current chairman, was heartily impressed by their garbage recycling system. He set the goal of realizing the use of Vanke-built communities’ garbage classification system all across the country within three years. In acknowledgement of the forward thinking of Taipei’s garbage treatment policies, some footage of it was included in a film run on the largest 4D cinema of the Vanke Pavilion.

Redesign It – Landfill to Landscape

Garbage dumps besieging the city once plagued the city of Montreal, and local citizens made strenuous efforts to eliminate them. The Montreal Pavilion in the Best Urban Practices Area demonstrates through its multimedia installation the innovative ways one of Canada’s largest urban centers used to achieve sustainable urban development.

The Saint-Michel Environmental Complex in northwestern Montreal was the third largest landfill in North America in the 20th century. Since 1968 it had swallowed more than 37 million tons of garbage, so when Kim-Tien Huynh, PR director of the Montreal Pavilion, first arrived there a few years ago, she was confronted with an exposed landfill that was as large as 300 soccer fields. Local residents were plagued by its offensive odor, violent foraging birds, and the incessant drone of garbage vehicles dumping their loads. More terrifying was the nightmare of underground water pollution by the leaching liquid.

To remedy the 30-year-old landfill, the municipal government launched a plan in 1995 for a series of projects to restore the damaged soil, install a safe garbage management system, and construct sports, recreational and cultural facilities. Now a 192-hectare park has permanently covered the dump site.

The new environmental protection endeavor includes six ecological centers that handle recycling and reutilization of old wooden and metal materials, furniture, clothes and home electric appliances abandoned by residents, among other things. The citizens also benefit from reutilized items, for example, fertilizer made from fallen leaves. Every year the municipal government collects the leaves and sends them to the Saint-Michel complex to make fertilizer, part of which is used by the municipal gardening department and the rest provided free to nourish private lawns and gardens.

Last March Kim-Tien Huynh revisited Saint-Michel and discovered a revitalized and beautiful community. Shopping districts were conveniently located, and in no time it would become Montreal’s largest park. She decided then and there that she would buy a house here after she completed her mission in Shanghai.

Garbage Gulpers

The Expo Park is a showcase of human wisdom in garbage disposal. The park receives on average 400,000 visitors each day over its run of 184 days. Consider that the average visitor generates 0.28 kilo of garbage a day, the total daily amount would be 150 tons. Clean up was a massive problem that the host city of Shanghai pondered at length before the opening of the World Expo.

The Expo Park maintains a corps of 3,588 sanitation workers and hundreds of advanced cleaning vehicles all powered by new energy sources. Both sides of the road have v-shaped garbage cans that are connected to an underground pneumatic garbage treatment system that emits no pollution. This is China’s first pneumatic garbage treatment system used on a large scale, and is considered advanced in Asia.

The system has turned the roadside garbage cans into greedy gulpers. There are 53 automatically controlled garbage intakes in the Expo Park. When garbage accumulates to a certain level, it evacuates into an underground pipeline powered by a suction machine located 1,000 meters away; garbage is drawn to the collection center at 60 meters per second. At the collection center, it is separated, compressed, filtrated, depurated and deodorized before being packaged and sent out of the park.

Such systems utilized in foreign countries have reached an application rate of 40 percent in Norway, Japan and Singapore. Following in the Expo Park’s footsteps, Guangzhou’s Asian Games Village and Tianjin’s Eco-City, both now under construction, will install pneumatic garbage treatment systems. Shanghai will start to apply the system step by step in its residential areas at an appropriate time after the World Expo, according to Zhang Quan, head of its Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. Experts believe that the system will find its way into large Chinese cities within seven or eight years.